With the merit-based federal civil service under full blown attack from the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I think it’s time for a history lesson. But I’ll begin in the present.

Republican U.S. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has an interesting voting record. Known as a so-called “moderate,” she votes with the Democrats with some regularity. This is confirmed by Progressive Punch, which finds that over the course of her 28-year career in the Senate, she has voted the progressive position on 25 percent of “crucial” votes, and 40 percent of the time overall. The Democrats currently have 47 senators in their caucus, including two independents. Progressive Punch lists Collins as the 48th most progressive senator.

From an orthodox Republican point of view, this record is worthy of reproach, and Collins is often derisively called a RINO (Republican in name only). Of course, Democrats tend to focus more on the 75 percent of the time she votes with her party when it really matters. She’s a constant source of disappointment, particularly when it comes to protecting women’s rights, as she is a self-declared pro-choice Republican.

But Maine has a history of producing this kind of Republican. Before there were RINOs, there were Half-Breeds. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, a rift opened in the Republican Party due to highly publicized corruption scandals, beginning with the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. At the time, politics, at both the local and national level, was dominated by the patronage system, wherein much of an elected official’s power derived from their ability to dole out jobs to their friends, family and particularly their political supporters. Expertise and relevant experience were not the first considerations when it came to filling out government positions. Much more important was loyalty. This led both to inefficiency and graft, and inevitably to public displeasure.

The Gilded Age is not known for reform, but the Half-Breeds were dedicated to doing away with the patronage system and replacing it with a merit system. Their leader in the Senate was James G. Blaine of Maine. His efforts were opposed by orthodox Republicans who were known as Stalwarts, and their leader in the Senate was Roscoe Conkling of New York.

With the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the Half-Breeds gained a strong champion, as Hayes was determined to build a merit-based system. But his efforts were stymied by Conkling. The biggest and most consequential clash involved the Customs House at the Port of New York, which was controlled by Conklin.  Hayes asked Treasury Secretary John Sherman to initiate an investigation of the Customs House, and it revealed it was overstaffed with Conkling’s spoilsmen, at least a fifth of whom were expendable.

In an effort to do something about this, Hayes issued an executive order forbidding federal office holders from taking part in party politics or being compelled to make campaign contributions. At the time, future president Chester A. Arthur was the Collector of the Port of New York, and he and two of his subordinates refused to obey the order. When Hayes demanded their resignations, they ignored him. When Hayes nominated their replacements to the U.S. Senate, Conkling blocked two of them, confirming the third only because his man’s term had expired.

Hayes ultimately prevailed by making recess appointments for Arthur and his deputy, and when Congress reconvened, those men were confirmed over Conkling’s objections. This is how things stood in 1880 when Hayes kept his campaign promise not to seek a second term. This meant the nomination for a Republican candidate became a proxy battle for settling the dispute between the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts over the patronage system.

The Stalwarts convinced Grant to come out of retirement to seek a third term. The Half-Breeds chose Senator Blaine.

Grant was disheartened at Hayes’s attempts to dismantle the patronage system and, in consultation with Conkling and other Stalwart allies, agreed to run again. Conkling looked forward to reclaiming control of the New York Customs House and once again serving as President Grant’s right hand man, just as he had done during the earlier Grant administrations. On the other side of the aisle, Half Breeds supported none other than James G. Blaine for the Republican presidential nomination. The personal hatred between Conkling and Blaine, dating back to their early service together in the House of Representatives during the Civil War, made the issue that much more heated and complicated.

At the convention in Chicago, it quickly became clear that neither Grant nor Blaine could hope to prevail. What resulted was a hybrid ticket.

A compromise candidate was needed. James A. Garfield of Ohio, longtime member of the House of Representatives and currently Ohio’s Senator-elect, was liked and respected by members of both factions. Garfield had traveled to the convention to nominate another candidate Conkling and the Stalwarts would never support: Treasury Secretary John Sherman. On the 36th ballot, Garfield, still stunned that his name had been forwarded as a candidate at all, received the nomination. To appease the Stalwart faction, Conkling disciple Chester A. Arthur, just two years removed from his New York Customs House firing, received the party’s vice presidential nomination.

Now, you probably learned in school that Garfield won the 1880 election but was assassinated a mere six months into his presidency. You might not remember why he was assassinated. The assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, considered himself a Stalwart and had initially supported Grant. When Garfield won the nomination, Guiteau shifted his support to him and made some speeches on his behalf. Somewhat mentally unstable, Guiteau convinced himself that he was responsible for helping Garfield win New York and the Electoral College and sought a patronage appointment as consul in Paris. There was no chance of this happening, especially since Garfield had appointed Blaine as his Secretary of State.

In Guitreu’s troubled mind, the solution was obvious. Kill Garfield and Chester Arthur would become president. Surely Arthur, as a strong Conkling man, would preserve the patronage system and reward him with the job in Paris.

Aside from the delusion of thinking a presidential assassin would receive some reward, Guitreu didn’t consider two important things. The first was that Conkling had sidelined himself in one of the worst self-owns in American political history. It began when Garfield nominated William H. Robertson to be Collector of the Port of New York without consulting Conkling. Infuriated, Conkling crazily insisted that senators’ advise and consent role in nominations extended to controlling the nominations themselves.

Conkling devised a bold plan to force the issue and embarrass President Garfield. He and New York’s other senator, Thomas Platt, resigned their seats in protest and fully confident that the New York legislature would immediately reappoint them. (Recall that at this point the people did not elect their senators; rather, they were chosen by state legislatures.) Conkling and Platt miscalculated; the New York legislature was happy to be rid of them and promptly elected others to fill their seats. The Senate confirmed Robertson as head of the New York Customs House, and James A. Garfield won the only political victory of his very brief term in the White House.

The second thing Guitreau didn’t consider is the possibility that Arthur would be affected by the assassination and change his views on the patronage system. Just on a political optics level, it was a bad look for Arthur to be the beneficiary of an assassination clearly intended to produce a change in policy. There was a public backlash against the patronage system and an uptick in demands for reform. On top of this, he needed to prevent a schism in the GOP. He tried, mostly in vain, to keep Garfield’s cabinet, which was filled with Half-Breeds, from resigning. Blaine left his job as Secretary of State in December, although he would serve again in the position during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison.

When Arthur made his first presidential address to Congress in 1881, he requested civil service reform legislation, and a preexisting bill from Democratic Senator George Pendleton of Ohio was re-reintroduced. The Republicans who controlled Congress didn’t pass it and it cost them in the 1882 midterm elections. In 1883, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act sailed through Congress and was signed into law by Arthur. That Arthur became the champion of a merit-based civil service is one of the unlikeliest turnabouts in American political history.

The spoils system continued to prevail in many urban areas of the country, but this was the beginning of the end for patronage at the federal level. The Pendleton Act established that government employees be selected through competitive exams rather than political connections or loyalty. Most employees could no longer be fired or demoted for political reasons, and it was forbidden to ask them to give political service or contributions. To enforce this, the Civil Service Commission was created.

The Commission lasted almost a century until it was replaced in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Under that reform, the responsibilities of the Commission were assigned to three new agencies: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA). Within the MSPB, an Office of Special Counsel was created which is distinct from an office of the same name within the Justice Department. The authorities of the Office of Special Counsel derive from the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Hatch Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). Their job is to protect the merit system.

Whistleblowers are protected against reprisals for disloyalty, and employees are protected against demands for partisan political activity. Actually, partisan political activity can be punished and is covered under the rarely enforced Hatch Act. Also, importantly, the Office of Special Counsel prohibits discrimination against any employee or applicant based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, able-bodiedness, marital status, or political affiliation.

Under Title 5 U.S. Code § 1211, “The Special Counsel shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, for a term of 5 years…The Special Counsel may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In other words, they cannot be fired simply because a new administration wants someone else in the job.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump fired the current Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, on February 7, notifying him by a brief emailfrom Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor.

Good evening Hampton,

On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Special Counsel of the US Office of Special Counsel is terminated, effective immediately.

Thank you for your service,

Sergio

Dellinger promptly filed a lawsuit, claiming “The effort to remove me has no factual nor legal basis — none —  which means it is illegal.” A federal judge agreed and  reinstated him pending a hearing scheduled for Feb. 26.

Now, back at the job, Dellinger began hearing appeals from other federal employees who have been arbitrarily fired during Trump’s first few weeks in office. On Monday, he acted:

An independent federal oversight agency has deemed at least some of President Trump’s mass firings of probationary period employees unlawful, creating a pathway for those employees to regain their jobs.

The Office of Special Counsel, the agency responsible for investigating illegal actions taken against federal employees, issued its decision for six employees, each at different agencies. While the decision was technically limited in scope, it could have immediate impact on all terminated staff at those six agencies and could set a wide-ranging precedent across government. It has not been made public and was provided to Government Executive by a source within the government. OSC, which did not provide the document to Government Executive, verified its authenticity.

OSC has turned the case over to the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board for enforcement of its findings and is so far requesting a 45-day stay on the firing decisions. The agency said it will use that time to further investigate the dismissals and determine the best way to mitigate the consequences from the apparent unlawful actions.

MSPB has three business days to issue a decision on the stay request. If it does not act by that deadline, the stay will go into effect.

The MSFB has its own firing controversy. On Trump’s first day in office, he demoted Cathy Harris as chairwoman of the MSPB and then removed her entirely on Feb. 10. Harris immediately filed a lawsuit arguing that her firing was illegal and U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered that she remain chairwoman pending a hearing on March 3. So long as Harris remains in the position, the Democrats have a 2-1 advantage on the board.

It is not assured that either Dellinger or Harris will ultimately prevail in winning their cases, let alone that they can keep their positions even if they do. But, for now, they are the last bulwarks against the decimation of the merit-system championed by Half-Breed Maine senator James G. Blaine and enacted by President Chester A. Arthur.

As for Blaine’s successor, the RINO Susan Collins who serves as chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, she met with Elon Musk during the interregnum in December and came away “very impressed with his energy and dedication,” and said their conversation focused on “how we could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government to better serve the American people and to save taxpayer dollars.” But now she says Musk’s firings are “a big problem,” and she’s worried about their “impact on the state of Maine, on everything from our national parks to biomedical research.”

She’s also warning that Trump’s freezing of congressionally appropriated money is an unconstitutional violation of the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974, which is at least in part an effort to keep her job as top Senate appropriator relevant. These are nice words, but unless they are backed by action, she will fail to live up to her predecessor’s legacy for reform and moderation. The merit-based system will die.

I am not betting on her.

These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.